Blood & Rust

by S. A. Swiniarski

  “He ripped away any connection I had with your God when He damned me with His communion. I can’t look upon your blessed icons without pain; if I mouth the words of your faith, my tongue cracks and bleeds. My presence here, in a place you deem holy, is a painful fire within me. My soul is destroyed, all your salvation offers me now is the destruction of my body.” Stefan slammed the stone wall next to the door with his hand. The impact was hard enough to resonate the wooden door and splatter blood across his arm.

  He pulled his hand away from the wall, the skin flayed over the knuckles. As Stefan watched, the skin pulled itself back over the wounds with a tearing sensation that was more painful than the impact.

  “You cannot save me,” Stefan said as he watched his hand restructure itself.

  “You aren’t dead—” Gerwazek said from the other side of the door.

  “Yes, I am,” Stefan said. “Yes, I am.”

  “You still walk the Earth,” the priest said. “That means you are still open to Christ’s redemption.”

  “I was killed, my soul damned, and my body cursed to walk the Earth. Don’t you understand? Every legend casts me beyond the pale—”

  “I know, I know. But you aren’t dead, Stefan. You may have been infected with a dread affliction. But that cannot destroy your soul.”

  “But—”

  “Those legends were propagated by people who believed that any disease was either a curse from Satan or a judgment for your sins.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Perhaps you don’t know either,” Gerwazek said. “What I know is that, while your affliction is novel to my experience, the idea that God has abandoned you is all too common.” Gerwazek paused before he finished. “Every time I’ve seen that, it has been the person who’s abandoned God, not the reverse.”

  “Do you think I chose this?” Stefan screamed at the door. “You think I wanted this to happen?”

  He heard Gerwazek move away from the door. “Perhaps I should go now.”

  “This was taken from me,” Stefan said, collapsing against the door. The smell of blood, the hunger, was all forgotten. All Stefan felt was a deeper and even more painful void. “He took this all from me.” .

  Gerwazek had left him, and all Stefan could do was lean against the door and weep.

  12

  Monday, October 2

  Nuri came to Gerwazek’s church regularly now. He never felt completely at ease there, but he needed to see Stefan. In an odd sort of way it was beginning to have an effect on his own faith. He was going to temple more, and beginning to pay a little more attention to the sabbath.

  It was as if he was fighting off the visits to the church, trying to purge the Christian iconography that struck him every time he came here.

  Each time he came, he told himself that Stefan might have improved. Each time he was disappointed. Nuri was coming close to giving up, even if Father Gerwazek wasn’t.

  He reached the church just when the day was dying. It was a small, unpretentious building in the middle of the Slovenian neighborhood near St. Clair and East Fifty-Fifth. It was an old wood-frame building that offered no competition to the stone cathedrals that congregated downtown, or even to the much closer St. Vitus, which served most of the surrounding community. This place predated the erection of St. Vitus by several decades, but looked as redundant as Nuri guessed it was.

  The Civil War-era building was marked as Catholic only by a small sign and an unobtrusive statue of Mary standing next to the front stairs.

  Nuri walked through a wrought-iron gate, and around to the side of the whitewashed building just as the last of the daylight was bleeding away from the sky.

  The side entrance led to the basement. No one was there to greet him. He had passed this way often enough that no one paid much attention to him.

  Nuri walked back into a rear chamber, inside which was a small trapdoor that was barred with a padlock. Nuri had the key, and opened it.

  As old as this structure was, it was built on the foundation of an even older structure. Gerwazek had explained that his building had once been a stop on the underground railroad during the Civil War. Under the basement was an old hiding place.

  It was dark and damp down here. The walls were thick, and made of local stone. The floor was packed earth. The only signs of this century were the two bare light bulbs dangling from the wooden rafters holding up the floor above, and the stacks of wooden folding chairs.

  Nuri wove his way through the narrow passages until he reached an old oak door blocking off one of the chambers. He was still a few paces from the door when he heard a whisper cut through the darkness.

  “Nuri,” it said. The quality of the word made Nuri shiver. Stefan had gained the odd ability to be perfectly understood even when his voice was just on the cusp of audibility.

  “Yes,” Nuri responded, even though it wasn’t a question.

  “When will you free me?” Stefan’s whisper, and its echoes, seemed to fill the space underground.

  Nuri stepped up to the door and slid aside the cover on its small inset window. The room beyond had the same stone walls, and a single incandescent bulb. A cot sat in the corner, the only real furniture in the room. The floor was scattered with dishes from the abortive attempts to feed Stefan—he was long past solid food.

  “We’re trying to free you,” Nuri said.

  Stefan laughed, a rattling whispery sound. Stefan turned his face toward Nuri. He was so emaciated now that it wasn’t until he moved that Nuri could tell him from the rumpled blanket on the cot.

  “Kill me, then,” he whispered. His eyes stared into Nuri’s, open pits that were much too large for his sunken face. They tried to suck Nuri in, but he had enough experience now to avert his gaze. There was something about eye contact that tried to impose Stefan’s will on him.

  “We’re trying to save you—”

  “Save me?” Stefan said. “I’m past saving. Melchior took that from me....”

  Nuri shook his head. “We’re trying to save you from Melchior.”

  Stefan laughed, “You cannot save yourself from Melchior. I have His blood in my veins. I’m a part of Him. How can you undo that?”

  “Tell me more about it,” Nuri said. He’d taken out a notebook and a pencil. “About Melchior’s blood.”

  He could hear Stefan lay back into his cot. “The blood is everything to us. Mind, body, soul, the blood contains it all, controls it all. Those of the blood, we call ourselves that because we’re bound it, anchored to it. Because Melchior’s blood flows in my veins, I have a piece of his damned soul within my own.”

  Nuri understood. Stefan was what Iago had once called a thrall. A slave to an older vampire. In some sense, that was what Nuri was hoping to free Stefan from. It had to be possible; otherwise there would be no such thing as a free vampire.

  “Your own blood flows in your veins, too.”

  Stefan sighed. “What is my blood against Melchior’s power? His will commands my flesh.”

  “Then why doesn’t it command you here?”

  “Perhaps he thinks I’m truly dead now,” Stefan said. “Maybe I am, and in hell. I suspect that’s what hell is, being trapped with this hunger.”

  “Maybe Melchior isn’t omnipotent,” Nuri said. “Somewhere you believe you’re on holy ground. Maybe that belief holds him at bay. Maybe he can’t control you through these walls.” Nuri wasn’t certain of that. He wasn’t certain of anything. He hoped, and the hope now seemed to have basis in fact since Melchior had not shown up to claim his thrall. He was certain that it was Stefan’s belief that was the only thing that could save him.

  Stefan emitted a tired laugh that chilled Nuri. “Maybe I’m not important enough for Satan to care.”

  “Melchior isn’t Satan,” Nuri said.

  “You don’t know,” Stefan said. “You haven’t seen him in his glory, you haven’t had him in your mind. He killed me, then he killed my soul....”

  The con
versation spun again, full circle. Every time it led around again to the same point. The talks were a little longer each day, but they always began and ended the same way.

  “He isn’t Satan,” Nuri said. “He’s a monster, but he was a man once, just like you.”

  “Not like me, not like any of us.”

  Nuri slammed his fist against the door frame, “Why don’t you even try to fight him?”

  There was a long silence before Stefan said, “You think I haven’t tried? When I see what he’s done, what he’s going to do? But even the thoughts sear me, like being in this cell, on this ground. Even though Melchior has forgotten me, his blood remembers.”

  “Fight his blood, then,” Nuri said. “Melchior isn’t here. It’s just you and me. You have a mind, you have a will, why can’t you use it!”

  “Because ...” Stefan’s voice trailed off.

  The silence was long and dark. After a few minutes, Nuri said, “Stefan?”

  “Leave me,” came Stefan’s voice.

  Nuri spoke again a few times, trying to entice Stefan—then trying to anger him—into talking. Stefan didn’t break his silence. Nuri stood by the door for a long time hoping Stefan would change his mind, but he didn’t speak again.

  Eventually Nuri sighed and left him.

  13

  Tuesday, October 3

  Fight his blood.

  The thoughts echoed through Stefan’s fevered brain. It was a statement that was pathetically simple, but it seared itself inside his mind like a revelation.

  The blood was the life, the soul, the will, the flesh ...

  And the blood was the chain that bound him.

  “Am I evil, then? This your Bible says?”

  “You feast on the living. ”

  “Didn’t your savior say to drink of his blood? Eat of his flesh?”

  Memories flew through his mind as he waited for the priest. What he wanted was insane, blasphemous, perhaps even suicidal—but he knew that Gerwazek wouldn’t refuse him. Hunger burned in him as he waited, flaring brighter than it ever had. The aching lack inside him was worse than it ever had been. What was left of his pulse throbbed in his temples.

  “Our will, our soul, everything within us is bound within the blood. Our blood controls the flesh, moving it to our will. ”

  The wait seemed interminable. It seemed that he drowned in the hunger of his own decision for weeks before Gerwazek visited him. Every moment of that time was spent in a mental battle with the parts of himself that weren’t himself. Every shred of his mind, every fragment of his will, spent every conscious moment holding on to the decision, keeping it from sliding under the pain of Melchior’s will.

  Stefan drew some strength from the desperation he felt in that pain. It was as if the part of Melchior that lived inside him knew what he planned.

  And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, “This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me. ”

  Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you ...”

  The words seared in his brain worse than the image of any cross, or his presence in the house of God. But somehow he held on to the verse in his mind, despite the pain.

  When Gerwazek came, it was Stefan who spoke first.

  “Father?” he whispered from his cot. He was almost too weak to move his lips, and his body was drenched in sweat from the mental effort he had been maintaining since Nuri had left him with his newfound determination.

  “Yes, Stefan?” Gerwazek said. His voice was hesitant, as if Stefan had taken him off-guard. Perhaps he had heard something portentous in Stefan’s voice.

  “I want to take communion,” Stefan said.

  The resulting silence seemed to last an eternity.

  Convincing Father Gerwazek took longer than Stefan expected. Apparently their meeting in the graveyard chapel had made a deep impression on the priest. It took all the strength Stefan could muster to convince Gerwazek that he wasn’t going to lose control like that again.

  Stefan also had to convince himself of that. The smell of Gerwazek on the other side of the door, the presence of that much living blood, ignited a hunger that rendered what Stefan had felt in the graveyard insignificant by comparison.

  While every shred of Stefan’s will was concentrated on the burning image of Communion, the well of hunger inside him tore at every fiber of his body. Every cell was pulled by the desire to feed, and the pull was only checked by the image in Stefan’s mind, an image that pained him worse than the need for blood.

  Eventually the talk ceased. The memory of the words fell away from Stefan’s mind, which only had room for the image, the hunger, and the pain. Gerwazek left for a time, and for that time the hunger ebbed.

  When Gerwazek returned, the hunger returned a hundredfold. When Gerwazek opened the door, the first time it had been opened while Stefan was conscious, the sensation, the need, slammed into his brain like a runaway train. The presence of Gerwazek, suddenly within reach, tore Stefan apart inside.

  The tattered part of his will, holding onto the sacred image, was briefly torn apart by the screaming hunger from every part of his body. Stefan leaped to his feet, for the moment possessed only by a savage instinct to fill the burning void inside him with the pulsing life he felt moving just beneath Gerwazek’s skin.

  Stefan grabbed Gerwazek’s robed wrist, and their eyes met. Stefan could in a brief moment see everything through the priest’s eyes. He saw the fortress of the man’s faith, he saw his pity for him, and he saw fear....

  Stefan saw the fear, and it gave him enough pause to draw the painful shreds of his will together. Somehow he looked at Gerwazek, at the life flowing through his veins, and feeling the demonic need tearing at every muscle, every nerve, he managed to fall to his knees.

  Slowly he unclenched his hand from Gerwazek’s wrist and said, “Thank you, Father.”

  Genuflecting in front of Gerwazek, naked, his bony knees scraping on the stone floor, the bonfire hunger raging inside him, that was the first moment he really believed he might not be completely lost.

  That thought, a tiny kernel of faith, gave him the strength to reimagine Christ, reimagine the body and the blood. It gave him enough will to deny the physical hunger.

  Gerwazek was visibly shaken as he took the gifts, the wine, the chalice, and the Communion wafer, and began the ritual. Before this moment, the presence of these icons of his lost faith would have been as painful as a brand.

  He could look at them now without shrinking away. The pain was there, their presence seared themselves into his consciousness, but now it was as if it was something else inside of himself that was burning, something he could distance himself from.

  Gerwazek broke the wafer and raised the chalice, and as he spoke in solemn Latin it was as if the entire room had become a kiln. The pain had progressed a thousand times beyond simple hunger. It was as if his flesh, each individual cell of his body, had burst into a slow fire that burned without consuming. Every muscle tensed and froze, as if it was tearing itself from the bone. Stefan felt as if his skin should blacken, crack and fall away in the presence of the glory. He had lost the ability to move voluntarily, and his body began to vibrate.

  The vibration soon came close to a seizure. He swayed in place, kneeling on the floor, his upper body trying to shake itself apart.

  Gerwazek held a part of the holy wafer in front of him. To Stefan, through blurred eyes, the wafer seemed to glow with an arc of light white enough to sear the back of his eyes with a purple afterimage.

  Gerwazek hesitated.

  Somehow Stefan managed to croak the word, “Please.”

  Gerwazek stepped forward until the only thing that Stefan could see, the only thing he could perceive, was the host. Then it touched him.

  The sensation was falling into a molten cauldron of lead, swallowing the metal, having it sear every layer of his flesh from the inside out. Stefan c
ould feel his flesh burn and crack. He could feel jets of flame shooting from deep inside the bone as it carbonized. He felt the consumption of his entire body except for the nerves that transmitted his pain. He felt his soul dragged screaming through every level of purgatory ...

  Then he opened his eyes and saw the light bulb dangling from the ceiling. He rose, every joint an agony to move, but the pain nothing compared to the immolation. He put his hands together in front of him. The skin was intact. Everything he had felt had been inside him, inside his mind.

  He said, “Amen,” in response to the priest’s words he had never heard.

  Gerwazek stared at him, and Stefan nodded.

  Gerwazek picked up the chalice.

  Fight his blood, Nuri had said. With God’s help, that was what Stefan was trying to do. What better way to fight the blood of a devil than with the blood of Christ?

  It didn’t matter now what happened. Stefan had beaten Melchior. He could feel the part of Melchior inside him, screaming. For it, the pain had not yet ended.

  Stefan took the wine. Again, it was a scalding heat inside him, but this time it was a light and a life far beyond what he could have taken from Gerwazek. It filled the void inside him, pushing aside the hunger. It kept filling, and spreading, pushing through him, displacing Melchior—

  Gerwazek said something that wasn’t part of the ceremony and crossed himself.

  He repeated, “Christ preserve us.”

  In front of him, Stefan’s hands, clasped in prayer, were bleeding. Stefan stood, slowly, feeling the glory burning within him. He separated his hands and saw the open wounds on them, spilling blood, Melchior’s blood, pooling in his palms and spilling over onto the stone floor.

  Other wounds had opened, on his feet, on his side, on his brow....

  He stood in front of Gerwazek, spilling blood from his own stigmata. He looked at his hands, said, “Amen,” and collapsed.

  14